3.4 In the Studio: Materials & Techniques of Willem de Kooning Part 2

Want to know how some of the 20th century’s most celebrated artists made abstract paintings? This course offers an in-depth, hands-on look at the materials, techniques, and thinking of seven New York School artists, including Willem de Kooning, Yayoi Kusama, Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko. Through studio demonstrations and gallery walkthroughs, you’ll form a deeper understanding of what a studio practice means and how ideas develop from close looking, and you’ll gain a sensitivity to the physical qualities of paint. Readings and other resources will round out your understanding, providing broader cultural, intellectual, and historical context about the decades after World War II, when these artists were active.
The works of art you will explore in this course may also serve as points of departure to make your own abstract paintings. You may choose to participate in the studio exercises, for which you are invited to post images of your own paintings to the discussion boards, or you may choose to complete the course through its quizzes and written assessments only.
Learners who wish to participate in the optional studio exercises may need to purchase art supplies. A list of suggested materials is included in the first module.
Learning Objectives:
Learn about the materials, techniques, and approaches of seven New York School artists who made abstract paintings.
Trace the development of each artist’s work and studio practice in relation to broader cultural, intellectual, and historical contexts in the decades after World War II.
Hone your visual analysis skills.
Use each artist’s works as a point of departure for making your own abstract paintings.

教學方

Corey D'Augustine

Art conservator, technical art historian, and artist

腳本

Okay. Welcome back to MoMA. My name is Corey D'Augustine. This is part two of, In the Studio Willem De Kooning. In fact we're here because of some of the comments that you left for us. Thanks for them. And as I drew your attention to last time, de Kooning is an artist who is very process oriented, he's labor intensive. So the idea of doing a de Kooning-esque painting in a day is kind of a joke. The idea of doing a de Kooning-esque painting in two days is also still kind of a joke, but I think you're going to see by the time we get to the end of the session, that the painting is going to be a lot closer to de Kooning than where we are right now which is quite frankly quite far. He's someone that reinvented himself again, and again, and again, and again. So there certainly isn't one way. There certainly aren't a hundred ways to make a de Kooning since he was relentlessly inventive. So again, a really complicated artists that we're talking about, what I'm doing here today and in the first video is picking out some motifs, some materials, some application techniques here, and I'm putting everything together in a way that hopefully is going to get as close to a de Kooning-ish painting. But really the point here is to embrace and engage with some of his working methods and materials. So, if we turn our attention to the painting itself here kind of a monstrosity, some really wild nice wet-in-wet scuffing going on, some scrape marks, some drips cascading down the canvas quite interestingly, the charcoal from last time embedded in the paint film which is now dry to the touch. But you'll see this in many De Kooning works. That being said, this painting has some issues no doubt about it. One of them up here just a very kind of unresolved and rather ugly to my eye, a combination of colors and textures. Spatially, it's looking a little like spaghetti. There's not a real density of the painting. Now there are certain areas that are very rock solid, like here parallel with the edge of the canvas of this nice yellow plane back here. The best de Kooning paintings are tight, and I'm talking about the space the painting is very dense. This is something I'll continue to talk about as we start painting. At any rate, I kind of have a plan for where we're going to go next. Now in the studio, it's not great to have too rigid of a plan. It's nice to have an idea of where you're going, but stay open, stay flexible. So, we've made some paint in weeks past, but I'm just going to amplify some of that yellow. It's a cadmium yellow, working with a rather fleshy consistency here. So that's cadmium yellow, I'm working with a little bit of buff titanium here. Buff titanium is nice because it makes the color a little bit more neutral, rather than these screaming pure high chroma colors. A little bit of medium here, this is linseed oil, and about the same volume of solvent. This one is gamsol that's basically just odorless mineral spirits. Also am going to be working with some black, or non-color that we don't have on the canvas yet. de Kooning and many many other artists prefered not to use just a plain black straight out of the tube, but let's say chromatic black. So, black plus a little bit of color. Black itself can be very flat dead kind of boring tone. So what we're going to do here, in fact I've already added a lot of black. I'm going to add a little bit of red to that, little bit of blue to that, ultramarine blue, that's cadmium red. And again, a little bit above titanium, light it up a little bit, make a little bit more neutral. I've already added some medium and some solvent in here. And essentially, what I'm going to do is make a really dark purple, rather than a black just to have a little bit of purple character in there to have a little bit of variety, because I will be working with a black black and then kind of a purplish black as well. Okay, so one of the things that we're going to be doing today is, wet over dry technique. One of the problems with the first phase of painting is that everything's wet. And if you've tried to paint like this as a novice oil painter, it's very often, very common mistake that these paints just continue to combine and combine and combine wet-in-wet, which can be very interesting giving these very fluid gestural marks here, but also can tend toward brown and everything mixing in kind of a dead heavy way. So, we are going to be working wet over dry. But another interesting thing that you can do with a dry paint surface is scrape it off in a very different way, than I scraped previously. You remember that this area was scraped, the wet paint came off there, what we see is a little bit of white ground. The texture of the canvas in some of these charcoal marks that I began the work with. Now if I start to scratch now or scrape now, a very different kind of thing. This is really chiseling it's a very sculptural technique here. I've kind of flayed back into the surface, flattened out that impasto there, and also revealed a very matte surface rather than a glossy one, and actually slightly different color, because of the surface of a paint film often dries slightly different than the interior of it. Now, you certainly don't have to start scraping all that stuff off, but if there are areas that you don't like or textures that you don't like, this is certainly a nice time that you can start to remove them. Now, one of the things I'd like to do to begin here, since I'm trying to bring this painting forward in space, is start to really allow these forms to commingle a little bit, it to start working with some whites in the upper and lower registers of the painting. Now, if I added white to this painting while wet, well, might be interesting, but we're going to pick up a lot of those colors and that white is not going to stay white for very long at all. Working white wet over dry, allows us to really bring some opacity into the equation, not pick up those under layers and really knock out some of those areas. Okay. What I'd like to do next is really to start opening up that yellow. So let's see where that takes us. And you can see that the yellow I mixed today is a little darker, it's a little bit more richly chromatic, a little bit more intense than that previous yellow. And I like this, it's nice to have some cousins of colors, rather than really repeating the same color again and again. de Kooning would sometimes place newsprint directly on the surface of his painting. Now I don't think that he meant originally to transfer images or text onto the paint film. I think that originally when he did that, he wanted to keep the surface from drying. Why? Because sometimes he wanted to keep working wet-in-wet, the next week, the next month perhaps, and have not dry as my canvas has here. In fact the text of old newsprint, would dissolve in that solvent and it'd actually transfer onto the face of the painting. We're talking about 1949, which is quite early when we're talking about image transfer processes here in the New York school. What am I talking about? If I'm talking about image transfer you probably thinking about Andy Warhol and silkscreen or Robert Rauschenberg and some these ballpoint pen transfers. You might not think about De Kooning though, but maybe you should. As I take this off, you'll say well, that's kind of interesting. Interesting texture there, but I don't see any newsprint. The reason why is that newspaper technology has, Well I guess improved since the 50s, but not in the context of making a De Kooning type painting. But imagine I transferred some of that text onto the surface here, strange, an abstract painting that starts to have newspaper effects in it. Maybe it's the news, maybe it's a photo, maybe it's some sports, box score, or something like that. Well, it's important to think about de Kooning as often going the other way, often playing a kind of contrarian card. Again remember that in 1950 when almost all the new York School painters were painting abstractly, De Kooning painted the figure. Well, how about the figure? One of the things that de Kooning would do to incorporate the figure even in sometimes abstract paintings, is to start working with drawings. And I've made, you know, not de Kooning drawing obviously, a bit of de Kooning type drawing. But before I start to add that to the painting, I'm going to do something that might seem a little weird. I'm going to turn the painting on its side. In fact, when De Kooning had the means to do so, he built himself an amazing studio out in the east end of Long Island, getting himself out of the chaos of Manhattan. And in that studio that he really designed himself quite aggressively, he sort of invented, I don't know if that's really the right word, but he designed a custom made easel which actually is mechanically rotatable. So in fact there is a kind of trapdoor in the floor so that a huge canvas could rotate down, so that really 360 degree rotation would be possible without having the canvas fall off the easel. By rotating the canvas, we're accessing different angles and different geometries of the human body, because there's some motions that our bodies just don't naturally tend to go in. So, what I'm going to do here, is take this de Kooning-ish drawing. This is a fragment of a drawing of a woman's face. Okay. And I'm going to put it where it doesn't belong. In other words on the surface of a painting and also on an abstract painting, something quite different from what's happening here. Now, what's happening here? Well something strange and weird is happening right here. Again, there's this friction this collage idea where we jump from one logic to another. Now De Kooning wouldn't simply do this and just leave it there, although occasionally you do find little fragments of paper on his finished paintings. He would do this to start incorporating the logic of one space into another. And what do I mean by that, is that oftentimes, he would continue some of these lines off of the drawing onto the space where it doesn't belong. So I'm just going to continue some of these lines. Okay, so in addition to drawing, extending drawing lines off of a previous drawing onto the painting. Sometimes, he in fact paints off of the drawing onto the painting. Thinking about the shape here. Right? This kind of I don't know what that is, a pepper grinder or something like that, a part of it. I'm going to reinforce that on the drawing now, but with paint. So, through here, around that corner and then down. So, first of all, I now have a strange painted drawing, which I'm going to keep around. Because perhaps in the next canvas, the third canvas, the fifth canvas from now this might come in handy. And in fact, maybe this color is going to be interesting, or maybe I'll turn this into a work on paper and eventually this has a life of its own. So we're getting to have an understanding of what de Kooning studio practice is like. This is strange, right? All of these drawn lines are stop on an edge as if it were scraped off, but of course you know it wasn't. It was actually on a different surface. And then here, really nice and interesting, this beautiful thick brushstroke here stops off in a very non-handmade way, right? I could never have painted that mark despite, you know, however much effort I put into it because there's something very linear about that, and that crisp lip of paint there is something that maybe I'm going to keep around. This kind of remembrance or relic of this very complicated process. Speaking of complicated process, let's keep on complicating it. We're now in an inverted position from where we started, and things are beginning to tighten up here. We're starting to get more blocky planes of color. We start having some interesting moments where under layers are visible here. Certainly, some of the gestures and the shapes from the original composition are staying here. I'm also quieting this painting down. It is kind of this raucous cacophony of all of these battling hues and it's starting to chill out a little bit, if you will, starting to quiet down here. Now, I'm going to amplify that yellow a little bit to keep on going, since this is really one of the structural components that I'm going to be working with here. Also, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to start to use those marks that came off of that painting as a kind of guideline for where I may work next. For example, I have this interesting black line here, so I'm going to follow that. And I have another interesting black line coming down here, which happens to coincide actually with that corner. So I'm going to start using that as well. To my eye, what's happening here is we're starting to get some interesting planes of color. We're starting to get some interesting relationships between marks. Here's an awkward one though. Here's something that oft when I start here but it strangely continues in white and has this unconvincing bend here. So we need to do some heavy editing there. Also, the relationship between this U-shape, or whatever yellow mark that I've made, and the white is very nebulous. So I'm going start to interweave them a little bit. And to do that I'm going start working with black. Or again, what I mentioned before this kind of chromatic black, it's actually very dark violet that I'm going to be working with here. These drips are quite interesting, a symbol of the speed of the paint, the fluidity of the paint. And anytime you start to see drips like that, start to realize that they're going to look really interesting if we just keep on rotating here. Now, how often did de Kooning rotate his canvases? Well, we'd have to ask him to know that answer for sure. Now some interesting things are happening. Those black brushstrokes, sorry, paint drips here, they're going really horizontally. So, in a way you might be tricked into thinking that there was a kind of you know this kind of elbow gesture explosion of paint across the canvas. But then when you realize how linear these are and how parallel they are, actually, you realize that pretty soon we're going to have drips going in all of these different directions. So, this time, I'm just going to use a straight black, which hopefully is going to look a little bit different than that black kind of squarish shape that I just applied. Now, one thing you can probably already realize here, it's almost silly to say, is that this painting has changed a lot really quickly. De Kooning's paintings often, not always, did this. And in general, this is a nice idea in the studio, not to fall in love too much with what you've already done but to always be willing to risk that, to gamble that on a better painting, on a more interesting composition. But another approach that de Kooning did occasionally use in his works is to work with enamel paint. Now, enamel differing from the oils that we're working with here. Enamel is a household paint. In other words, it's coming out of a can, like this, rather than a tube. And in the can, as you know from painting your bedroom or your picket fence, you're talking about some very fluid and usually very opaque, very pigment rich paint. It's also very fast paint, so it's the kind of thing that, again like some of the paints I've prepared here, really is great for action painting. Harold Rosenberg's term here, brushstrokes that really recall the speed of the gesture with which they were applied. Now, famously in Woman One, here in the Modern's collection of 1950, in fact, I worked on that painting for 18 months so I'm not exaggerating here. That painting has a band of aluminum enamel paint down the right-hand side. de Kooning often worked with black and white and sometimes aluminum paints. I'm going to do something similar to that here. When working with enamels, make sure you give them a good stir first, because the pigment tends to settle out towards the bottom in kind of a sludge. And I'm going to reinforce the left margin of the painting here with this aluminum and we'll see what happens. So, what this serves to do is to really push the composition forward. This is a flattening device, and this is the type of painting that I chose to pursue today, a more flat spatially type painting and that's a really nice device to do that. Now, as we did last time, removing paint again is a really important aspect of a de Kooning process, usually de Kooning process at any rate. However, when we remove paint today, it's going to be quite different from how we did that in the first part of this video, since before I'm removing paint from well nothing except a white priming with some charcoal on it. Here, I'm going to be removing it from paint. So as I start to flay into the surface a little bit, some interesting things are happening here. First of all, I'm revealing some of the colors from that under layer. I'm also, as you saw, getting tripped up by some of that impasto and I'm making these unforeseen little skips in the paint film, etcetera. And I like this, it's quite interesting and it's something that, again, I'm embracing here as a painter. But it's a little bit unpredictable because I've obliterated them, I don't know exactly where those bits of impasto are. Now again, de Kooning is often celebrated for these very explosive moments of painting and this really does look an explosion of pink paint, to my eye very beautiful that the way that this paint is almost electrically cascading across the surface here, these little zigzags, these microscopic little blips of paint here and there. de Kooning is often celebrated for this kind of work, but it's really important to understand that far more than he's actually at the surface, you know, hacking and slashing if you will, he's actually at a great distance and really looking and really thinking about his paintings. So we could see that the paintings, the compositions from a global perspective, from a great distance to really understand how the composition works. Rather than getting lost here in the trees so to speak, he's back looking at the forest. Well, I don't quite have the space to do that here in Manhattan, go figure. But already, I can start to see that some interesting things, some more cubist inflected things are happening here. It lost a little bit of the dynamism or the action of the composition. And what do I mean by that? Well, these shapes are very blocky and rectangular. Now, part of that is good, because I'm really tightening up the composition. Part of the point here is to understand what the painting wants to do, not really what you want to do with it, what the hand wants to do. But how can the composition grow, what does it want from me anyway? What it wants, is to follow this upward, break up that horizontal black line, which is a little bit too graphic, a little bit too flattening, and let's see what happens. Now already what you can see, because I'm working with a light color over a dark color, Wet-in-wet, it does not have the legs at all that that black did when I was working over light color. One trick here, if you want to keep the yellowness, don't push down so much. I was scrubbing there. This next stroke, I'm going to apply the yellow more lightly so we're not really forcing those colors to mix. So, I'm going to keep a little bit more of the yellow on the surface here. Now, it worked but what you can see there is, there's a lot more paint. So when in doubt, when there's too much color, start scraping. I'm starting to realize that these two lines if you will, these two areas are roughly parallel to each other. And I might want to make that a little bit more dynamic. I also might want to start making more of a relationship between this black squarish or rectangularish kind of guy and this yellow zone or space underneath. I'm going to choose to make a very fluid paint here and I'm going to use a really loud gesture as I did in the pink there, and a more horizontal character. I have this nice teal, aqua, turquoise paint made up here. I'm going to add a little bit more oil to it because this one I really want to pop. I'm going to be using my elbow and wrist. And I really want to make sure that the velocity or the speed of that gesture is really translated, is really captured if you will kinetically on the surface of the painting. Okay, so there is a kind of Jackson Pollock type gesture actually. It's very loud. It's very dynamic. It might be a little too much. It might be a little tacky. It might be a little bit cheesy. In fact, the brush didn't even hit the canvas. I missed slightly. I like parts of this, but in here maybe it's a little bit too much. So again, I can start doing some editing. Not. Sometimes this happens. I think that was a mistake because what happened, I wanted to quiet down that part of that bluish green color but in fact what I did, I wasn't thinking, I probably should have taken more time, is that I reinforced that edge of the black which is actually what I was trying to undo. Now, that stroke was short and sweet but actually changed a lot because suddenly this background which a minute ago we argued was the furthest away from our eye, the one that's really receding in space, suddenly, I tangled that background in with the foreground since this is physically on top of a lot of those other really forward thrusting kind of planes. But I'm going to go back and again, not take it easy. I always choose the more challenging route, a very de Kooning kind of idea here. So let's start working with another drawing on the surface. In fact, before we do that, let's make another turn. So obviously, I've torn the drawing here, making a nice edge there. I've also pushed the painting or the drawing up against the painting vertically a little bit to stretch or smear that paint. And I'm roughly reinforcing again that band of silver that I laid in there a few minutes ago. So, let's do a little more drawing. So, I kept on breaking the surface here. The reason to do that, breaking the surface of the charcoal, this is soft vine charcoal that I'm working with to expose fresh charcoal. So, I'm now taking the previous wet paint because clearly the paint is still extremely wet and I am pushing that paint around as much as I am smearing the graphite around. Okay. What you are just seeing there is me fighting and fussing a little bit with the upper portion of the composition, trying to get these enmeshed a little bit more and fussing about edges, a little bit of that. Now, it's sort of working and it's sort of not. I have some of these marks which are still a little bit hard. I do like some of this stuff though, some evidence of where I was working over here but it's extended all the way over here. And again, this is because the paint is wet. It's very fluid and this paint is really made for recording the traces of your own hands, as well as your own body. But again, for me, I'm still fussing up here and some of these effects I don't really like here. So again, removing paint is a great way to start fixing things. Okay. So, I think a good time to call it quits for today. The painting has changed a ton, obviously. I think it's really grown forward. You might be thinking, "Well, what was the point of all of that underpainting, if this is where we're going?" Two points. First of all, I didn't know that this is where we were going. And then second of all, that underpainting is actually quite visible still in this work. You might be thinking what are you talking about? Well, certain colors are really visible. But really, it's these scrape marks, it's these very uncontrolled but really accepted and not preconceived but invited, in other words, marks to happen, which has everything to do with not only the color but the texture of that underpainting. Now, the more you want that texture to play up, the more scraping you're going to be doing, or the more really fast painting that you're going to be doing. Now, is this a finished painting? Well, if I put on my de Kooning hat, definitely no. However, I think it could be a finished-ish painting. Me personally, I would like this to dry. I'd like to have one more session working wet over dry. I was really fussing and laboring down here and I'm still not really happy with it. I lost some of the geometry in the yellow with a more muddy yellow I put in. This is still pretty murky and unresolved down here. However, when it's really wet like this, it becomes hard to clean it up. It becomes hard to add space to it. One way, you saw me try at the end there, Jackson Pollock's way for adding space to a painting, is to add white to it. You can do that or light pink to it with a little explosion like that. However, if I really start trying to put in a zone of white paint here, as you saw me try to do a couple of times, I'm going to lose it. It's going to become quite murky. So, I would probably plan to have at least one more painting session here, tightening up things with a little bit wet over dry technique, but I think we are far more than halfway home here, or at least we could be. So at any rate, here we are with a de Kooning type painting, de Kooning style painting, mixing and matching from a lot of different periods of his career, working with a variety of materials, methods and getting us somewhere reasonably close to the aesthetics of a Willem de Kooning painting. Thanks.